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State Officials Blast Penn State in Sandusky Case

Students gathered to watch a live news report on the scandal at Penn State University campus on Monday.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The Pennsylvania attorney general and the state police commissioner excoriated Penn State officials on Monday for failing over several years to alert the authorities to possible sexual abuse of young boys by a prominent football assistant.

They said the university employees who declined to report the incidents to the police put countless more children at risk of being abused by Jerry Sandusky, the longtime assistant who has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year span, including during his tenure as an assistant at Penn State. Frank Noonan, the police commissioner who spent more than 30 years with the F.B.I. and the attorney general’s office, said the nature of the alleged incidents was unprecedented in his experience.

Even after Sandusky “made admissions about inappropriate contact in the shower room” in 1998 to the Penn State campus police, “Nothing happened,” Noonan said. “Nothing stopped.”

He said that janitors witnessed a sexual act in the football facility’s showers two years later, and still “nothing changed, nothing stopped,” because the janitors feared for their jobs and did not report the incident. Then, in 2002, according to prosecutors, another sex act involving Sandusky and a young boy was witnessed by a Penn State graduate assistant coach, who reported it to Coach Joe Paterno — yet the police still were not contacted.

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Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley, center, and Gary Schultz, right, the vice president for business and finance, walking into court in Harrisburg on Monday.Credit
Patrick Smith/Getty Images

“That’s very unusual,” Noonan said Monday at a news conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg where he and Linda Kelly, the attorney general, summarized the cases against Sandusky and two university officials. “I don’t think I’ve ever been associated with a case where that type of eyewitness identification of sex acts taking place where the police weren’t called. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before.”

Two Penn State officials charged with perjury in their grand jury testimony and failing to report the suspected sexual abuse surrendered Monday, a day after they stepped down from their positions. The officials — Tim Curley, 57, the athletic director; and Gary Schultz, 62, the vice president for business and finance who oversaw the university police — were not required to enter a plea. They have denied any wrongdoing, and their lawyers are expected to seek to have the charges dismissed.

“I think you have the moral responsibility,” Noonan said. “Anyone — not whether you’re a football coach or a university president or the guy sweeping the building — I think you have a moral responsibility to call us.”

When asked if there might be more victims beyond the eight children mentioned in the grand jury report, Kelly said, “When you look at the totality of the circumstances and the number of victims that we have, I don’t think it would be beyond the realm of possibility that there are other victims that exist here.” She and Noonan encouraged any other possible victims to contact the attorney general’s office.

Kelly said Paterno had cooperated with investigators and fulfilled his legal obligation to pass the information to a superior when, in 2002, the graduate assistant told him about an incident involving Sandusky that he had witnessed in the football facility’s showers. Paterno is not considered a target of the investigation at this point, Kelly said.

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The Penn State student newspaper The Daily Collegian was full of coverage of the sexual abuse scandal.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

After the graduate assistant told Paterno, Curley and Schultz about what he had seen, Curley briefed the university president, according to the grand jury report. No one at the university alerted the police or pursued the matter to determine the well-being of the child involved. In fact, Kelly said Monday, the identity of that child remains unknown.

“Those officials and administrators to whom it was reported did not report that incident to law enforcement or to any child protective agency,” Kelly said. “Their inaction, likely, allowed a child predator to continue to victimize children for many, many years.”

According to prosecutors, Sandusky preyed on young boys he met through the charity he founded years earlier, the Second Mile, which was designed to help disadvantaged boys. The charity released a statement Monday that said that Curley had told the organization’s chief executive in 2002 about the report from the graduate assistant, but that the matter had been reviewed internally and no wrongdoing was found. “At no time was the Second Mile made aware of the very serious allegations contained in the grand jury report,” the statement said.

The grand jury report has no mention of an internal review of the incident by Penn State.

According to prosecutors, Penn State could have halted the abuse in 1998, when Sandusky was an assistant for Paterno. A mother of an 11-year-old boy Sandusky had befriended at his charity reported to the campus police that her son had been touched and held by Sandusky in a shower at the football facility.

Prosecutors said an investigation — which grew to include allegations about a second young child being similarly touched by Sandusky in a shower — was carried out by the campus police.

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The attorney general of Pennsylvania, Linda Kelly, discussing the details of the case against the former assistant Jerry Sandusky.Credit
Daniel Shanken/Associated Press

When asked whether Paterno or the university president, Graham B. Spanier, was aware in 1998 of the investigation, Kelly said, “All I can say was that investigation was handled by Penn State University’s police department.”

Paterno’s son Scott said in a telephone interview Sunday that Paterno had not been aware of the 1998 investigation.

Gerald Lauro investigated the 1998 allegation for child protective services. He said he did not find enough evidence of sexual assault to determine that the charge was founded. “I did my investigation and I based my determination on all the available evidence,” he said.

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Noonan, a former chief investigator at the attorney general’s office, said the methods Sandusky was suspected of using were common in these types of investigations. He said it was known as “grooming” victims, in which an adult identifies a child, becomes a mentor, gives him gifts and establishes trust.

Prosecutors say he took many of the boys to campus to visit the team’s field and eat in the dining hall, and took them on trips to postseason games.

Even after the 2002 incident that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and Spanier were told about, it appears the university continued to allow Sandusky on campus. And as recently as 2009, the university system was promoting the Sandusky Football Camp, a four-day, three-night clinic held at Penn State campuses in Erie and Harrisburg, according to an advertisement for the camp published Monday by Deadspin.

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2011, on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Nothing Changed, Nothing Stopped’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe